Brodmann areas have been discussed, debated, refined, and renamed exhaustively for nearly a century and remain the most widely known and frequently cited cytoarchitectural organization of the human cortex.

When von Bonin and Bailey constructed a brain map for the macaque monkey they found the description of Brodmann inadequate and wrote: "Brodmann (1907), it is true, prepared a map of the human brain which has been widely reproduced, but, unfortunately, the data on which it was based was never published"[6] They instead used the cytoarchitechtonic scheme of Constantin von Economo and Georg N. Koskinas published in 1925[3] which had the "only acceptable detailed description of the human cortex".